Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Bob in Castlemaine; The Head of the Australian Conservation Foundation Kelly O’Shanassy delivered a solemn warning last Tuesday to a packed audience of journalists, claiming that if we continue to burn coal and breach the 1.5C IPCC climate limit, “100s of millions of people will die”.
Gloves off over climate policy: ACF chief
By REBECCA GREDLEY
AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
2:44PM OCTOBER 30, 2018Kelly O’Shanassy has run out of time to be polite over climate policy.
The Australian Conservation Foundation CEO says recent warnings from scientists and two decades of climate inaction mean the gloves are off.
“If we continue to burn coal and gas for decades to come, we will kill the 1.5 degree target, we will not have a habitable planet and hundreds of millions of people will die,” she told the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday.
“When people are defending burning coal and gas, then that’s what they’re really talking about – those hundreds of millions of people whose lives will be at risk.”
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Read more (paywalled): https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/aust-climate-policy-under-the-microscope/news-story/d6a6ab7145c31456dc9f1457c9ce738f
According to Andrew Bolt, a well known conservative Australian climate skeptic, the most shocking thing about this speech is not one journalist in the audience challenged this ridiculous claim.
AND NOT ONE JOURNALIST CRIED: “THAT’S NUTS.”
Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
November 1, 2018 10:02am…
Pardon?
“Hundreds of millions of people will die”? We will “not have a habitable planet”?
But get this: not a single journalist in the room said: “Are you nuts?” Not one asked: “What’s your evidence?”
To me, it’s mad, bad and dangerous that a room of journalists can hear a shiny-eyed speaker proclaim the end of the world — at least for humans — yet react without the slightest scepticism.
Have they no eyes to see or brains to think? Just look outside.
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Even for green Australia this press silence in the face of such indefensible claims is shocking.
If the world breaches the 1.5C limit, nobody will die because of the breach. All that will happen is on average Summer might last a few days longer every year, or winters may be slightly milder. Given that cold weather is a far greater killer than warm weather, breaching the 1.5C limit would likely save lives.
Okay. First up, ‘National Press Club’.
Our no doubt extremely qualified guest speaker in this situation was addressing the National Press Club.
“Who are the National Press Club?” we hear you ask.
Short answer is “Grud knows”. Less flippant is that it is a private club with the elites of media and business to rub shoulders with each other, listen to guest speakers once a week and generally remind each other just who actually runs the country. They are important because the media tells us they are important and the media knows this because most of them are members.
The associated question is who is Kelly O’Shanassy when she is at home and why is she important and then we end up back in that circle of mutual back scratching. Kelly is important because ‘non important’ people do not get to grace the Press Club and because she has addressed the Press Club her views are now clearly important.
The big question here is less why did the massed Australia press not question Kelly’s bold statements, but instead how have the media been allowed to become the defacto rulers and gate keepers of knowledge. Reality check – they write columns that either inform, entertain or offer opinion. They are a service, not our Moral Betters.
I wonder how this “breach” actually works?
Like do the people die instantly? Like at +1.5 degrees everything is OK and then at +1.500001 hundreds of millions of people drop dead?
If the Population Matters folk have their way, this is exactly how it works, although the figure is 1 billion
And apart from old age, what do all the rest die from? The Australian press must be more gullible than the British press.
FMD. Can we please get a list of the ‘journalists’ that attended this event and write to each of them demanding to know why they didn’t question this bullsh!it? (Or were questions not allowed?
Samples of the questions I would ask them: Is is because they are too ignorant of basic science (or statistics) to tell that they were being fed a crock, is it because they are ‘true believers’ of this CAGW cr@p and didn’t want to upset the apple cart, is it because their bosses would have been very cross with them for ruining a good ‘story’, is it because the owner of their media organisation has a hidden agenda, etc. (I could go on but you get the idea by now).
To get a list of the journalists that attended the lecture is a very good idea. We can then research their publications and we can all write to them asking why they did not question such an outrageously stupid statement made by this woman and point out a few more inaccurate facts that they have all been taken in by. Can one of our Australian friends do some research for us and let us know the result.
Climate change is manmade. The same way zombies, ghosts, Men in Black, gnomes and Orks are manmade.
You’ve forgotten us, the Langoliers, you Troll.
Investigative journalism in Australia has certainly died. They just get paid to publish news releases that attract paying eyes. This is news training 101, provided by Al Gore. Find a great headline: “an unhabitable planet”; “hundreds of millions will die”. Evidence, you ask? Sorry, that’s not newsworthy. Fake news? Never mind, next headline?
Disasters are far better than good news stories. Good news: “the earth is getting greener;” “there are less people living in poverty.” Boring.
Hey Robber, I live in Oz. Investigative journalism is certainly not dead. But the journalists here are mighty selective about what they investigate.
Unfortunately Human Caused Climate Change is the ruling ideology.So it is not that much investigated in the MSM.
But there’s plenty of heretics writing investigative journalism of it..Just they don’t get published in MSM..Try JoNova’s blog for example.
Did the speaker suggest that we tell the IPCC come Greeen UN to demand that all countries stop burning fossell fuel immediatly, especially those Öff limit”countries such as China and India.
Of course not, therefore they the audience are just a bunch of hyprocrits.
Remember the David Attenborough programmes showing that as the food supply is eaten, then animals either move or die. Inn our case with the human animals we must stop accepting people from overpopulated countries, or it will be our countries which will die.
MJE
“100s of Millions of People will Die”, that s why must hang skeptic right now. The are criminals to be.
Mod
bearing in mind the recent discussion about threatening behaviour, please not the above comment from lemiere jacques
That fellow seems to be French, so it might be taken as one of these continental eccentricities, the “Calais” proverb is, in my opinion, not too far-fetched in this case.
Nonetheless, I concede that being too lenient towards enemies of free speech won’t end well.
And that alarm comes from the very crowd that would herd people into concentrations camps for mass execution.
If we cooled the planet and dropped the CO2 to pre industrial levels, 1 billion people would die within 3 years and crop prices would triple to ration the shortage as a result of plunging yields and production world wide.
No amount of advanced farming technology could offset the losses.
We rescued the planet from dangerously low CO2 levels.
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
Stephen Crane
Well, with this all skepticism on this blog, I will most certainly have to cancel my planned trip to the Great Barrier Reef. The million year old plus wonder of the world was once a site to behold. What happened the last two years?
I guess the money will be better spent at a Trump resort. Trump, one of World’s smartest men, certainly backs the majority of the skeptics on this blog.
I live on the shore of the Coral Sea, I’ll let you know if all the coral disappears…
The GBR is most threatened by pollution (real, not fake), and likely to various human activities, including overfishing. It is actually quite resilent though, and has been bouncing back. Climate Numptys love to latch onto things like polar bears or the GBR as “proof” of their fictitious manmade climate change/warming.
Kervon – Are you skeptical of skepticism?
You’d go there and look for yourself. But don’t forget to take a printout of this
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/05/29/197687/
with you. May be, that opens your eyes a bit?
Why would they ask, they have heard it all before , as we all have. There would be a lot of condescending waffle about settled science, 97%, extreme weather (even when it not and not even trending up)and of course shooting the sceptical messenger. Most in the room would nod sagely and shift slightly away from the questioner.
Alarmists can’t keep their story straight. And when someone spews utter nonsense like this, you don’t hear anyone else on the alarmist side correcting them. No journalists even ask, “Is that the mainstream view?” No, they all just let it stand, because even if it’s wrong and misleading, it’s still “helpful.”
You want to reduce emissions? Maybe tell your cohorts to stop standing in the way of nuclear power.
The last time we had a warmer climate, the planet was so hostile to life that lizards grew to be 100 feet long, there were dogs the size of horses, and butterflies with 2′ wingspans.
Regarding Nuclear power being the answer, I agree, but remember the 60 tees and the picture of the Mother holding a child, and in th background the Mushroom shaped cloud of th aftermath of a bomb.
Never mind that th enrichment of Uramium for a Power station is about 11 %, as against th bomb needing about 97 %.
The Greens will always find another way to scare us with. The sad thing is that our politicians with few exceptions appear to believe in this nonsense, or is it just the quest for votes and don’t worry about the damage to the country.
MJE
Add a few billion to the deaths of the existing population by 2100 unless we can defeat poverty. Many places people don’t live to be anywhere near 80 and we will have peaked at ~9B (probably get to ~10B and then decline as poverty is finally erased). Ive predicted a “Garden of Eden Earth^ тм” by about 2050 with peak population and “The Great Greening тм”. It will be a world of plenty with bumper crops, available mineral and other resources. I guess the only way to get this forecast out there is to hsve it engraved on my tombstone.
The Climate Numptys know their ideology is going down the tubes so, having nothing to lose, they have raised the rhetoric to DEFCON 1. We knew this would happen. They no longer care how batshit crazy they sound. They are at their most dangerous now, like a cornered rat.
Journalists and rent seekers are the main audience at this point.
“But get this: not a single journalist in the room said: “Are you nuts?” Not one asked: “What’s your evidence?””
______________________________________________
Where d’ya think reporters reap their punch lines.
Having been in the room with a bunch of “journalists” during a similar presentation I was also gobsmacked at their attitude. Talking to some of them during the break I discovered they fell into two categories, (1) True believers and (2) those that believed only they were too ignorant to understand but believed everyone else did. The true believers would have accepted anything the “famed and renowned” speaker had said as gospel no matter how bizarre and outrageous. The “I am to dumb to understand” truly believed since they didn’t really understand what was being said, no matter how illogical and bizarre, they didn’t want to look even more stupid by asking questions. There was a group in between, a sort of ‘I want to believe but what the speaker said was really outrageous’, but since no one else asked they didn’t either.
Lindzen nailed it with the Groupthink-
http://joannenova.com.au/2018/10/lindzen-on-why-the-educated-elites-are-so-vulnerable-to-being-fooled/
Thanks for the link.
I fully second what Lindzen meant.
Resource wealth is truly intoxicating to society as seen in Australia.
Basically they are claiming that if the world gets as warm as it was during the Roman Warm Period, to say nothing of the Minoan Warm Period or the Holocene optimum, we are all going to die.
These dudes are so far past delusional that I can’t think of a word adequate to describe them.
“IF we continue to burn coal AND breach the 1.5C IPCC climate limit…”
So, in other words, it’s NOT going to happen.
On the other hand, if the Climate Nazis get their way and implement their “climate policies,” THEN BILLIONS WILL DIE, and THAT will be the ACTUAL human-induced catastrophe.
Millions will die, or Billions will die. What’s the big deal? Isn’t our surplus population part of the problem to begin with? As long as the Warmists are first in line at the 1.5C cliff…..
Omnia moriatur.